Print shops handle sophisticated and/or large volume print jobs for customers. A print shop typically includes a number of high-end printers (e.g., multifunction printers, continuous-forms production printers, etc.) that are capable of providing more functionality and/or print volume than a simple office printer. For example, a print shop may be used to print massive print jobs (e.g., having hundreds of thousands of pages) on a monthly basis in order to provide documents such as billing statements to large volumes of people.
A print shop is often managed by a print server that receives print jobs from client systems/devices (e.g., networked computers, mobile phones, etc.) and distributes those print jobs for printing. The print server tracks the progress of the print jobs as they are being queued, printed, and completed. For large jobs that include many individual documents, it may be important to record the properties of completed documents (e.g., when they were printed, who they were directed to, the address they were mailed to, etc.) in a searchable archive. The archive allows a print shop operator to confirm that individual documents were properly handled by the print shop. This information may be particularly important for print jobs that include financial information, as the law may require that these documents be printed and mailed to the correct recipient within a certain period of time.
Archiving the information for a large volume of documents (e.g., millions or tens of millions of documents) across numerous different print jobs remains problematic, because a print shop operator expects to be able to search the entire archive quickly and efficiently. Existing solutions using databases (e.g., Structured Query Language (SQL) databases) are hard for users to manipulate and parse, and also encounter implementation problems when attempting to share database information to remote users. Furthermore, databases are not easily moved from computer to computer.